Replies

[Thanks for that post]

Given the generally Mongoloid cast of the Hazara, it would not surprise me if they faced serious prejudice from Iranians not all that dissimilar to what they faced in Afghanistan from Pashtuns on down. The idea that they would be loyal to Iranians who used them like toilet paper seems contrary to human nature. Whereas Uncle Sam arrived like an avenging angel in 2001 to sweep the Taliban - the blood enemy of the Hazaras - from power. An instructive article about the Hazara situation in Afghanistan during and after the Taliban’s reign:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173847
[The Hazaras, a minority that claims descent from Genghis Khan’s world-conquering horsemen who live primarily in the remote fastness of Afghanistan’s central Hindu Kush mountains, played an outsized role in the Afghan National Army and US military operations for good reason. As long-repressed members of the Shiite sect, who have seen their villages torched and people massacred by the Taliban from the dominant Sunni sect, they were fighting an enemy that considered them to be “Godless heretics” worthy only of butchering.

During the course of my extensive fieldwork in the Taliban-infested Pashtun lands, where I came to admire the courage of the Hazara soldiers serving alongside US troops, I became overwhelmed by the mindless and often random horror of the war. After arriving at the scene of particularly gruesome suicide bombing of civilian men, women, and children in the eastern town of Gardez, I got permission to leave the killing behind for a while and decompress in the sheltering peaks of the Hindu Kush. There, in the snowy mountain-ringed Hazara capital of Bamiyan, I found panagah, sanctuary, and a welcoming people governed by Afghanistan’s only female governor. In those terraced, clay-walled mountain villages clinging to the side of steep, misty valleys, I also found widespread gratitude to the Americans for their role in liberating the Hazaras’ lands. Theirs was a relatively peaceful world that was so far removed from the war ravaging the hot Pashtun lowlands to the southeast that I imagined it to be an Afghan Shangri La. While there were signs of the Taliban’s cruel rule over this people that had seen them literally skin Hazaras alive and rape and burn, such as the crumbled ruins of the magnificent 6th century Buddhas of Bamiyan that had been blown up by the Taliban iconoclasts as “heathen idols” in 2000, this mountainous realm was relatively peaceful, welcoming and safe. ]